Swim this year

Avery loves being on the swim team. She wakes up, in the Summer when you are supposed to sleep in, at 6:15am and jumps into a fairly chilly pool to swim laps and practice her stokes for over an hour. Brooklyn tried last year, but peaced out this year. She might be smart. But Avery is determined and loves doing things that push her! She was the youngest in her division this year, so she had a lot more competition. She had a couple 1st place finishes, but usually was around the top 5 finishers. She excelled in freestyle and the backstroke. She really loved doing the relays with her teammates. Swim team is honestly such a blessing. It is great for kids! 

Skate land

Sometimes as a mother of four, I am motivated to get out and do stuff, but mostly I'm motivated to stay home and avoid crazy and chaos. Today was a day I decided to do something fun. I loaded the kids up, drove an hour and 15 minutes to Mesa and we went to Skateland. Its a skating rink. Yes, only one of my kids knows how to skate. Yes, I myself haven't skated in years. Yes I have a baby and a  toddler, but why not? Luckily the place was pretty much empty. And luckily they had little walkers with wheels on them so the non-skaters could lean on those for support as they learned. And luckily they allowed strollers on the floor. It all worked out. Avery got her skate on, Brooklyn was like the tortoise and slowly but surely made her way around with the walker, Leo was pretty content in the stroller, oh and I remembered that I knew how to skate. The kicker was the 3 year old. She just wasn't a fan and didn't have the patience. We tried several times, but in the end, she sat on the bench and cried.

Thanks goodness for cotton candy to make everything else better! 

I'm super proud of myself for attempting this. I'm also super grateful that the older kids had fun and enjoyed it. Phew! We were all sore the next day! 

Blast from the past

I would say that we made some of our best friends during medical school. It has been 5 years and 3 kids since we have sen the Romney's. We both just happened to be in SoCal this week, so we met up. It was just like the good old days... except 8 kids... oh and Adelyn and Avery were super awkward (they used to be best friends, now their friendship is a legend from the past)! We love our townhome friends!

Newport Beach 2018

This trip was amazing! We had mostly had beach time, but in between, he had pool time, downtime at the resort/kids club and cousin time.  Oh yeah, and the floss, that was huge this trip (if you don't know what that is because it's not cool anymore, than google it, it was epic.) That is really all I have to say, I will let the pictures do the rest of the talking.